The Silver Bough (20 page)

“Find anything else?” The Colonel was staring at Arthur's jacket which covered part of the interior.

“Yes. We have found a hoard.”

The Colonel's mouth came adrift.

“It surprised us, too,” said Arthur, reluctant to move. “It tells the story of a whole age.”

“Where is it?”

“Under that jacket.” He still could not move.

Blair stooped and lifted the jacket, thus revealing the hoard. Items: a broken electric torch, five brass army buttons, a silver-bright Seaforth crest, a motor horn with perished rubber bulb, and a cheap cigarette case containing—of all things—a one-pound Treasury note.

“My God,” said the Colonel more in awe than anything.

“They're coming,” said the girl quickly.

Arthur glanced over his shoulder, then swiftly covered the mouth of the urn with the girl's kerchief.

“Will I give them the dope?” he asked Colonel Mackintosh.

The Colonel glowered at some members of the public who were slowly, circuitously, but certainly, drawing nigh. “I should have liked a photograph of this.”

“I have taken six,” said Arthur.

The Colonel looked at him with an enigmatic humour. “The play is more realistic than we had hoped.”

“We hadn't counted on such a stage manager.”

“By gad, we hadn't! Or should I say Gu gad?” The Colonel's humour was dry but flavoured.

Blair carried the draped urn past many staring eyes as the three learned men headed for Grant's lodging. “The meaning of the play,” the Colonel explained, “is this. The crock of gold has now been found and will be conveyed south for expert examination. The cairn will be completely closed up this evening. Colonel Mackintosh and his associates are leaving tomorrow. Everything is over. Let the public depart in peace and Clachar return to its ancient somnolence.”

“Is that what Arthur is telling the world?” asked Blair.

“It is,” said the Colonel, “with some ambiguous embellishments. It was the best I could do for you, Grant, in the way of getting rid of the menagerie, especially its scavengers.”

“Not too bad,” Grant allowed.

“There's a way of handling these fellows,” suggested the Colonel. Blair so appreciated the remark that he glanced at Grant and stumbled and the old bones rattled in the urn.

“Of course, Arthur being a bright young man,” proceeded the Colonel, “had his price. In the first place, I promised him one of your prints of the lunette and one of the jet necklace. That all right?”

“It might be managed.”

“Secondly, when we return here to open up the whole cairn in a week or ten days, we shall countenance him as a sort of press agent in chief, or vague words to that effect.” He negotiated an awkward cleft, puffing as he hauled himself up. “Talking about handling the press, did I ever tell you the one about the tomb and the mummy?”

“You did,” said Grant.

The Colonel cocked an eye at him and laughed as they continued on their way.

W
ith the Colonel's departure the weather broke, wind and rain from the sou'-west drove flapping curiosity before it, and Grant stood looking from his little window as from a newer kind of earth-house. His feeling of seclusion was deepened by a fragrant warmth from the peat-fire which Mrs Cameron had insisted on lighting. “The bit fire is friendly,” she had said.

The green of the grass was greener, fresher, as wind and rain swept along under the hurrying sky. The grasses flattened themselves, wiggled, in a green mirth that held on. The rowan tree was a more solemn riot, full of convolutions of itself and high bursts of abandon, but sticking to its own root at all the odds. For a miraculous moment the cat appeared on the garden wall. A blackbird whistled and was gone. Between the bursts he heard the pounding thunder of the sea.

He took a turn about the room; he stood before the fire looking at the lazy flapping of the yellow flame.
Friendly
. He turned his face over his shoulder and looked about the room, alert and welcoming, wondering, and glanced out of the window where the riders drove fast. His smile broke into a soft laugh. It was amusing; it was gay and intricate and extraordinary. The landscape had been swept clean of all the chatter. The sea was having a thunderous holiday, smashing the rocks, roaring tumultuously into the caves.

A vision of the Monster Cove came before him; in an instant submerged contacts were made and he saw that the electric torch which had been found in the short cist was the torch which he himself had dropped in that cave. There was just no doubt about it. He hurried upstairs and hauled out the hoard, unscrewed the cap of the torch, and found the piece of cardboard which he had used to keep the cell from rattling inside the case. There might even be some juice in it yet. He transferred the bulb from another torch and produced a red thread of light. Proof positive.

He had gone back to the cave and looked for the torch; had failed to find it and decided it had got covered over by wrack or shingle; had promptly forgotten it in exploration. Now it was not only clear that Andie had found it but had found it in the dark. Which means he had used a light. Andie liked striking matches. He enjoyed pressing the button of a torch and producing the magic in so novel a way. But here was a use of light in a prehistoric cave for a definite purpose—or—at least—from a definite urge.

He put the hoard away and went downstairs. As he left his sitting room Anna happened to come out of the kitchen and stopped at sight of him.

“I thought I'd have a turn out,” he said.

“It's stormy, isn't it?” She smiled.

“It will do me good. And how is Sheena today? I have hardly heard her.” The child's voice had drawn his attention but now it was silent. As Anna looked back into the kitchen, he took a step or two forward and saw Sheena sitting under the table, her face pale in the dim light.

“She's been having a game with herself,” murmured Anna.

But Sheena's face exhibited solemn wonder at the new vision of their guest in oilskin and sou'wester, and when the guest stooped and spoke she continued to gaze at him with grave reserve. He laughed and went out.

As the wind staggered him at the corner of the house he laughed aloud. He had instantly understood what Sheena was doing under the table. Even when quite a big boy of seven or eight he himself had been fond of odd corners, of going into hidey-holes. A certain piece of the attic had been Aladdin's cave. Suddenly he wondered if these early centres of the brain were those which still actuated Andie. If the later centres were inhibited, would the earlier deepen much as a blind man's hearing sharpened?

The rain pattered noisily on oilskin and sou'wester; it stung his face, it was cold as well water, it was fresh, it became fresher, and as he stood for a moment on the other side of the little bridge, where the wind's force was broken by the slope, he felt exhilarated, as though there was no joy like a clean cold joy, no colour like this colour, no dancing wildness like the world's own.

He kept low, avoiding the upward paths, and was soon in sight of the sea. Beyond the pines that surrounded Clachar House, his eye caught the white plumes tossed from the southwest corner of the southern island. Breaking seas to the horizon, an inward rushing, a roar of surf on shores, a deep booming from cliffs.

As he came low by the boathouse, he saw how the islands sheltered the sea-way to Clachar, how boats in a storm would run for the islands, and knew that thus it had been since man first hollowed a tree-trunk and adventured upon the waters. Clachar was old. No wonder he was sometimes confused by the centuries, even by the millennia! Confused with the humans rather, who were the millennia, so that the woman and child from the cist in the cairn . . . . His thought passed into a visionary warmth and press of life. But Donald Martin's face came expressionless and old as the grey rock. All at once he was aware of someone beckoning to him from a corner of the boathouse. He stood for a moment as before some illusory trick. Then he saw that it was in fact Mrs Sidbury.

She greeted him with her usual cheerfulness, her restless flyaway manner, but he saw that she was quivering.

“It's the cold,” she said. “Phoo-oo!” and she shivered right into the core in an exaggerated way that was at once frank and friendly. Her dark eyes looked at him and flew away. Her yellow oilskin was buttoned across her throat and the strings of a yellow translucent head-cover were tied under her chin.

When he suggested that if she got colder it mightn't do her any good, she laughed and asked, “What brought you out?”

Suddenly he felt warmly attracted by her, dangerously because he felt that she needed handling. There was something worrying the woman and once again he got the impression that her bits might fly asunder. But now this did not embarrass him, though it induced a certain excitement. When he found the most sheltered corner she jumped up and down in a light dancing movement, trying to throw off the shivering cold.

“Anything gone wrong?” he asked normally.

She shook her head as if he had asked about the weather. “Just that brother of mine.”

“What's he up to?”

“I wish I knew. It's the sea.”

“You don't mean he's been trying to go to sea?”

“He would try anything with the sea.” She danced and shivered and shook the cold from her face. “After the last few days he'll feel like it.”

“Why?”

“The extra depression, following on visitors.”

He thought for a little and asked, “Does he get depressed?”

“Perhaps it's not a good word. There's nothing left in him.”

“After visitors, his mind is drained grey as that rock.”

The continued casualness of his words must have been like a gift to her, for she glanced at him with a quick smile and nodded.

“Why do you invite them then?”

“I must do something. There is always the hope that he may be taken out of himself.”

“And you're always wrong. Tell me this: what did you really mean by mentioning the sea?”

“It's the last element,” she said lightly, and glanced at his thoughtful expression as he now stared before him. “He goes more and more to the sea. He catches all the fish. He has lines and nets.”

“You mean——” He hesitated.

“It's the way he's going,” she said.

He did not look at her. It was tragic, but for a strange moment, beyond this woman, in another light, he thought: It's a good clean way. And for the first time he got an austere vision of Donald, of the final element in the man, and it touched him deeply and fatefully. He could not speak.

“Colonel Mackintosh—I like him,” she said. “And that man, Mr Blair. There's an ordinariness, a normal way of living and working—I thought if only——” She went stuttering and hurrying on but he had nothing to say. Even the warm personal impact she had made upon him passed away.

Presently he began to speak quietly. “I was in the first big war. I remember what it felt like when you come home and find that you have no real contacts, you have been shifted outside them, you are outside and cannot get in—and—perhaps—in your silence, for you cannot speak, cannot tell—don't want to get in, want to stay out, to go away and wander—where the ghosts are—remembering those you knew . . . . That was common.” There was no emphasis on any of his words, no warmth; his memories seemed automatic.

“How did you get on?” she asked.

“Work. I started working. Gradually new human contacts were made and the memories went farther and farther away.”

“Donald has no work.”

“Oh yes, there's always plenty of work,” he answered, as if that were not the trouble. Then he turned his face to her. “Does he—do you—believe that that girl up there, Anna Cameron, has his child?”

The lightness, the impersonal manner, fell from her. She squeezed the cold out of her hands. She looked startled and frightened. “They say so.”

He remained silent but his face hardened.

“Do you?” she challenged him.

“Yes.”

“You think he should marry her?” she cried a trifle wildly, broken by his quiet sternness.

He took his time. “Would you be against it?”

“Why should I? Why should you think that?”

“I am only asking you.” But his voice now was gentler.

“I would not be against anything that was for his good. Surely you believe that!”

“I do.” But he could not add anything more though he was aware she was struggling against an obscure accusation.

“Do you think it would be for his good?” Her face was white and challenging.

His silence seemed to torture her so that she cried, “Why don't you say what you think?”

“No, I suppose it wouldn't,” he replied in a quiet almost downcast voice.

“You know it wouldn't!” There was a sharp triumph in the bitter voice and this affected him somehow to a deeper silence, and he became aware that in some mysterious way he had been brought still nearer to Donald, to that plane where all words were a distraction and without real meaning.

“He is not ready for it yet,” he said. The words “probably he never will be” formed in his mind but it was as if he could not be bothered speaking them aloud.

“You know there is nothing I would not do for him. Nothing!”

And he knew it was true, but he also knew, in the case of what they had been discussing, that it was true
as a last resource
. But, one step farther on,
a last resource
would always be too late. She knew this also. He decided he had better say something. “I had a long talk with your brother one night. I think I know a little about how he feels.” He paused.

“Did he mention her? What did he say?”

He looked at her, for it was astonishing to him that she could even imagine they had discussed so personal a matter. Instantly he apprehended a profound distinction between man and woman. She moved restlessly and her face flashed away. “No, we didn't talk about that. About other things,” he answered. “But I should say that he simply has no interest whatever in Anna or the child. Just none. That's the trouble. And even if he tried to get an interest it wouldn't come. He knows he would be of no use to them. Not that he tries to justify himself in that way. If he did, there would be no final difficulty.”

“I know!” she cried. “That's just it! And he won't go away. What can I do?”

And now it was almost as if there was hope in the woman's voice, certainly the craving for hope in a new line of action, some other bright way out of the awful despair.

“I don't know,” he said, and added, reflectively, “I'll think it over.”

Her gratitude touched him. He had liked her from the very beginning and now he told her of the torch which he had dropped when they were together in the Monster Cove and which he had found again in Andie's hoard. She became enthralled with interest, as if their talk had lifted her into the happiest state of expectancy, and asked if he thought Andie might have buried the crock of gold in the cave.

“It's possible,” he said. “He may have more than one hiding place and the cave might strike a deep memory.”

When he left her, he became consciously aware of the smell of the sea and its tossed tangle, looked back and saw the white-smothered waves and the thrown spume. As these were shut off, the freshness of the earth came upon him, out of the long-parched ground, and the colour, the wet vivid green. The wind flattened and combed the irrepressible grass, the drenched wild flowers, and the rain was a driving mist against the dark-brown mountains. All at once he saw old Fachie by the sheltered gable of his house, his left arm outstretched and his dog rushing low to the earth to round up a cow or stirk that had got into the young corn. There were no other figures to be seen and in a moment the little drama with the old bent figure might have been of any Age back to Neolithic times. When he had watched it to a conclusion and was going on again, words dropped into his released mind. He had quoted them more than once from the Preface to Frazer's
Golden Bough
: “Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition the testimony of ancient books on the subject of early religion is worth very little.” “And,” as he himself had often added, “not only of early religion.”

He smiled, aware of still carrying the remarkable quietude, which had so strangely come upon him by the boathouse.
He won't go away
she had said. Nothing was keeping him, of course. He would want to see people less and less . . . no one . . . until the sea got him. He stood for a little while, quite unaware that he had stopped, in a curious mindless wonder, then went on to the cottage.